Today we are featuring two poems from the work of Catherine Barnett, both available in her collection Into Perfect Spheres Such Holes Are Pierced, which won the 2003 Beatrice Hawley Award. Her other honors include a 2004 Whiting Writers Award, the 2004 Glasgow Prize for Emerging Writers, a 2005 Pushcart Prize, and a 2006 Guggenheim Fellowship. Barnett's poetry has appeared in The Iowa Review, The Massachusetts Review, Pleiades, The Literary Review, Lyric, Barrow Street, Shenandoah, Interim, The Hat, and The Washington Post. She currently teaches creative writing at NYU and as Poet-in-Residence at the Children's Museum of Manhattan, where she teaches writing to young mothers in New York City's shelter system.
In the first poem, Living Room Altar, Barnett reveals the unrelenting grief of her sister whose two young daughters were lost when their plane crashed in the ocean. Captured in exquisite, spare imagery, the poem alludes to the mythic nature of such a tragic loss. In a second poem, Gardener's Song, Barnett again uses succinct images to acknowledge the ambiguous power of nature -- to bloom and thrive, and yet, to be subject to mortality even in the fullness of creativity. The poems are offered on the From the Fishouse site, which also has audio versions of both pieces.
(The image above is "Spring" from an ancient Pompeii fresco.)
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